Cities across China have come to life with a surge of holiday shoppers, as consumption-boosting policies drive demand and lift confidence ahead of the Spring Festival.
The 2026 "Shopping in China" and Spring Festival Consumption Season was launched early this month, aiming to fuel a consumption boom through measures targeting goods, services, and diverse spending scenarios.
In downtown Xiamen City of east China's Fujian Province, a distinctive shopping district built on an old factory has become a popular new tourist attraction. It has introduced nearly 40 high-quality brands covering retail, entertainment, sports, and other fields, attracting a large number of citizens and tourists.
In north China's Tianjin Municipality, a newly built market space integrates cultural and creative product exhibitions, catering, leisure, and nearly 100 cultural performances, becoming a new choice for citizens and tourists during holidays. The city launched a three-month Spring Festival consumption season, creating a number of new consumption formats, models, and scenarios, such as exhibitions and ice and snow activities, to unleash consumption vitality.
In Liaoyang city, northeast China's Liaoning Province, an 80-hectare indoor temperature-controlled greenhouse garden brought a new cultural tourism format different from its iconic ice and snow season. Here, tourists can not only enjoy flowers and scenery but also buy local specialty agricultural products and watch Yangko dance performances.
This year, the eastern Chinese province of Anhui launched the 2026 Spring Festival consumption season for new energy vehicles (NEVs), reducing the cost of car purchases by issuing consumption vouchers together with trade-in subsidies.
In 2025, Anhui ranked first in the country in terms of automobile and NEV production, and maintained its leading position nationwide in vehicle exports which surpassed the one-million mark.
This year's Spring Festival begins on February 17, and heralds the Year of the Horse.
China’s 2026 consumption season fuels holiday shopping boom nationwide
The International Organization for Mediation (IOMed), the world's first intergovernmental legal organization dedicated to resolving international disputes through mediation, fills an institutional gap in international mediation, the body's Secretary-General Teresa Cheng said.
In a recent interview with the China Global Television Network (CGTN) in Beijing, Cheng talked about the significance of IMOed's inauguration in October 2025.
"If we look at the United Nations Charter again, Article 33, we've provided for these forms of dispute resolution. Yet for 80 years, somehow there is not a body that is dedicated exclusively to mediation. And I think that triggered these 19 countries when they made their joint statement to say, let's establish such a body, so it is filling the institutional gap. The second thing is that it also complements the existing dispute resolution mechanisms. Litigation arbitration is at the moment still a prevailing form of dispute resolution, but the states see the need, also called upon by the UN Charter, to establish something exclusively for mediation to complement the existing systems," said Cheng. "There are a number of states, in particular those from the Global South, are very interested in having a say in the development of this new body. Therefore, through this organization, there are, as I said, 38 signatory states now. I think the world is in a very interesting stage at the moment. There are a lot of differences, sometimes views get entrenched. By having a body that brings into effect inclusivity multilateralism, and of course, accommodating and understanding each other through dialogue, is a very important feature." she said.
Housing the organization in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region(HKSAR) also showed China's willingness to contribute to international mediation, said Cheng.
"The fact that we are housed and placed in the Hong Kong SAR, part of China, is because China is willing to contribute to this development, and Hong Kong very generously allows us to put our headquarters in one of the heritage buildings in Hong Kong," she added.
IOMed fills institutional gap in international mediation: secretary-general
